


commençant par le mauvais bout

by lincesque



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Angels & Demons, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-29
Updated: 2014-07-29
Packaged: 2018-02-10 22:05:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,198
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2041920
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lincesque/pseuds/lincesque
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(beginning at the wrong end)</p>
<p>
  <i>Then to him was given dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations and languages should serve him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom the one which shall not be destroyed. Daniel 7:13-14</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	commençant par le mauvais bout

 

**i.**

_Our Father, which art in heaven,_

_hallowed be thy name;_

_thy kingdom come;_

_thy will be done,_

_in earth as it is in heaven._

*

Will’s only memory of his mother is of her hand, soft, worn, stroking over his hair, his cheeks and the upwards turn of her lips when they press against his skin.

He remembers her voice, lulling, gentle, telling him about how she was out with his father one night, walking on one of the paths that wound through the grassy land, when she saw a shooting star. She tells him that she wished for him, that he’s her gift from heaven.

(He has a better memory than he should, maybe.)

He listens to his mother’s story, repeated to him yearly, on the night before his birthday, remembers her words verbatim and repeats them to himself the night before he turns seven, the house cold and silent, a vast gaping emptiness - as if all life and love and laughter left when she died. The thought of home is now a dull loneliness that never goes away.

Home is never quite what it seems and never quite whole ever again.

*

Lung cancer, the doctors say with gentle sorrow as they shake their head, helpless.

Will seethes in frustration because surely they should be able to do something, anything. But there is nothing that can be done and she withers away slowly in front of his very eyes, life draining out drop by drop until there’s nothing but dullness and death.

(He cries and cries until there’s nothing left - sunken eyes, hollow heart.)

*

His father is a good, honest man, if one embittered by grief. He does his best, holding stilted conversations neither of them want to have and Will loves him for it even as he hates him for loving his mother so much more than he loves his own son.

But Will is the spitting image of her, from his unruly dark curls to his bright blue eyes and too-pale skin. He smiles like her, he laughs like her. Soon, Will learns to look down, away, to frown, to never laugh.

He is not her, this is a fact that both he and his father know all too well.

*

William, his teachers say, voices sweet, soft. Pity for a boy with no mother and a father who cannot bring himself to care.

A good boy, they tell his father and no one ever notices how he’s a little too smart, his thoughts a little too quick.

He tells truth from lies effortlessly. It’s just one of those small things he can do and has never questioned, just like how he always knows if someone can be trusted or not.

(It’s his secret and he guards it fiercely, only one person ever knew and she lies dead now, buried beneath six feet of cold, dank dirt.)

*

There was a crucifix in their home, before his mother died. It hung, polished dark wood, in the doorway. It is the only thing of his mother’s that his father packs away - a reminder that there was no divine help, no miracle cure that came. The rest of their home is a museum, a monument to her. Everything the way she left it, a tomb for the living.

Will feels stifled, feels like the air itself chokes in his throat when he steps through the door. So he stops going home. Except it has not been his home or their home for a long time.

*

He has never been the religious type but for some reason, it doesn’t stop him from feeling the safest in a church. He spends hours sitting silently in the polished wooden pews, letting the golden sun stream in through the stained glass window spill over his clothes and the floor, or in the dark of night, watching the flickering flame of the candles set to burn at the altar.

(And he dreams so terrifyingly vivid sometimes; of flaming swords and gleaming black wings stretching across the setting sun.)

*

He’s sixteen, seventeen, a boy on the verge of manhood and he sees things - a glimpse from the corner of his eye, an echo at the very edge of his hearing. He wears glasses, thick frames and thicker glass lenses to hide the too-sharp blue of his iris.

Abnormal.

He’s only ever wanted to fit in, even as he knows he cannot.

*

The boy is young, terrifyingly so. His voice is still high and cheeks round with baby fat. His eyes however, they are old, knowing.

“You were made to fly with angels but destined to dance with the devil,” he says, dark eyes wide, pained. The sing-song quality drops to a low whisper that Will has to kneel down to hear. “To fly in heaven or burn in hell. This is your choice.”

*

( _I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, and I looked right through me._ )

“What do you see?” Will asks his first therapist, hands steepled, face blank. “What do you see?”

He steels himself for the answer for he is scared of losing himself, of listening to the voices that whisper at the edges of his mind and drowning in the darkness. He knows himself too well to believe it’s insanity. But in his heart, in the deepest part of his soul, he knows he does not want to know what it really is.

*

“What do you see?” he asks and the words are long past being just a habit now. He cares little for how dismissive his voice sounds and the way his eyes are fixed somewhere above his latest psychiatrist's perfectly coiffed hair.

The silence is nothing new, but the air of serious contemplation that Will can almost <i>feel</i> is. He lowers his gaze and finds Doctor Hannibal Lecter mirroring him, hands spread over his knees, feet planted flat on the ground, leaning forward.

“A good place to start,” he replies, simple.

And then he smiles.

*

Doctor Lecter - Hannibal - is different to everyone else.

Will only recognises the mask of humanity that the good doctor wears only because he sees the same thing reflected back at him everytime he looks into a mirror.

He can only guess at what Hannibal tries to hide.

*

Hobbs is not the first to spit at his feet, to snarl hatred, to spew mindless words that make both too little sense and all too much sense at once. But he is the first to try and touch him.

“To think that the Defender has been reduced to mere mortality,” he sneers and his eyes gleam a solid black.

Will’s hands rise almost by their own accord, fingers shaking around his gun and he shoots, emptying his clip into Hobbs.

(The Defender, the Protector - these are the names they call him and he wants nothing to do with it.)

*

Hannibal’s fingers hover over the jagged edge of the cut that goes straight through Will’s clothes, right over his heart. The medallion he wears tucked beneath his jacket, in his chest pocket, glints in the light, exposed. There’s a dent in the center of it.

“My mother said I was blessed,” Will says, voice unsteady, trembling. Tobias stares at him with deadened eyes, features twisted in a scowl of hatred even in death.

There’s silence as Hannibal contemplates this, eyes flickering from Will’s ruined clothes to the knife abandoned on the ground. “Or perhaps,” he says, his accent thick and curling around his words, with a tiny quirk to the edges of his lips, “you have the luck of the devil.”

 

**ii.**

_Give us this day our daily bread._

_And forgive us our trespasses,_

_as we forgive them that trespass against us._

_And lead us not into temptation;_

_but deliver us from evil._

*

They cast him out after the last Great War and barred Heaven’s Gates to him.

He has no interest in Heaven, or his Father or any of his siblings except for the one.

He had seen the anguish in Michael’s eyes, the rictus of pain that distorted his perfect features in that one moment when Michael had struck him down and pushed his sword into his chest. He had heard the waver in that glorious voice when Michael had spoken the Word of Banishment.

He remembers the pain, the endless searing pain of having his Grace torn into pieces, of it being ripped out from his soul and scattered.

But he smiles even as he falls and falls and falls.

*

They call him the Lightbringer, for when the apocalypse comes, it will be him who sparks the fire, the fiery inferno that will consume the world and bring it crashing down into hell.

He walks, barefoot in the dusk, and with each step, burns his footprints into the very earth itself.

*

He waits, like he’s waited for millennia, for thousands and millions of endless years.

He gives himself a new identity and hides in plain sight, in the world of humans, waiting for the day Michael finds him once more.

(His chosen name is Hannibal and he picks it out on a laughable whim, a flight of fancy - by the grace of - )

*

There’s a strange beauty to the Angel-Maker, the human who dares to burn the image of wings onto wood and asphalt, scattering raven feathers over the body in a mockery of angels.

He first meets Will there, a bare glimpse of pale skin and haunted eyes and Hannibal finally finds what he has spent all this time waiting for.

*

Hannibal finds Will standing on his roof, eyes closed and head tilted up. Will’s throat is bared, like an offering, and his skin gleams alabaster white beneath the setting moon. His features are half shrouded by the dark, the hollows of his cheeks, the jut of his jaw more prominent than ever and he’s so terribly beautiful.

Hannibal wants nothing more than to reach out and cut into that pale skin, dig his fingers deep and peel back flesh until the very bone shows. He thinks that the bleached whiteness of bone would match Will’s pallor perfectly.

He stands, far enough to not intrude but close enough to be visible.

“Hannibal,” Will says, the word carrying easily. There’s a soft sound that might be a sigh or a mumble.

Hannibal waits with baited breath and hopes that this time Will is again the one to chase after him.

*

They are drawn to each other, they are inevitable as the sun that sets and rises each day and night.

Morningstar is his other name, for he shone the brightest and was the most beloved by all before his fall.

Hannibal, he knows that they walk slowly towards destruction together if poor innocent Will, who buried his own Grace to forget his guilt, knows nothing at all.

(He feels the end approach and he licks his lips, wanting to taste blood and flesh and the burn of Will’s soul against his.)

*

Michael’s Grace is there, hidden within Will. Hannibal can feel it, he can almost smell it.

He touches him with his own tattered shards of Grace - soft brushes of shoulder, the gentle press of hand against hand, skin on skin, drawing it from its long slumber. He slides thin blades of Grace into Will’s throat, his heart, in both his arms and legs, into his head and he smiles even as Will twitches in agony.

(He is here finally and there is no longer any reason to spare Will the pain.)

*

The blade gleams with blood even as Will screams and Hannibal kisses him softly on the forehead, tasting sweat and fear and pain.

“It will be over soon, dear Will,” he croons and makes the final cut, deftly separating muscle from bone.

The bloodied stump of Will’s left arm thumps against the gurney helplessly. Will’s features twisted in the middle of a breathless scream.

A gentle touch heals the open wound, sears arteries and veins closed and regrowing skin in a bare second. The smell of blood lingers and Hannibal licks his lips.

He leans forward and kisses Will, deep, hungry, licks into his mouth and tastes blood on his tongue. A flicker of shadow and one of his wings curls protectively around Will’s shoulders as he sits, slumped in Hannibal’s embrace, panting with the effort to remain upright and conscious.

“And the Lord said: ‘Sit at my right hand, till I make your enemies your footstool’,” Hannibal murmurs.

Will shudders in his arms and goes still.

*

“What do you see?”

Will trembles, his blue eyes wide and afraid and fixed on the fragile Grace cupped within Hannibal’s broad palms.

Hannibal’s fingers tighten and an inhuman scream crawls out of Will’s throat, a beautiful sound of unearthly pain. The light of tortured Grace seeps out from between his fingers, chews through the skin and sinew of his hand and Hannibal smiles as the first drops of blood stain the ground.

He leans forward and places his lips to Will’s ear, blade sliding easily through papery skin and into his heart.

“And this is my design.”

*

_For thine is the kingdom,_

_the power, and the glory,_

_for ever and ever._

**_Amen_ **


End file.
